Wednesday, June 11, 2008

There are two conferences that I’m not going to be able to go to this summer that I really wish I could find a way to swing: The Erlang eXchange which will be in London on June 26-27 and The Ruby Hoedown in Huntsville, Alabama on August 8-9.

Erlang was a hot, swirling subcurrent at the 2008 MountainWest RubyConf. I get the feeling that there’s going to be a growing culture of cross-over between the Ruby and Erlang worlds. The Erlang eXchange is a two-track conference with a number of great looking talks covering topics like: Erlang D-Trace, Robotics and Erlang, Web programming and AJAX with Erlang, and Erlang Refactoring. The one shining light is that I’m hearing rumors of a Silicon Valley edition of this conference next April.

The Hoedown was a great success last year (check out the videos to see just how cool it was). And this year looks to be a great follow-up. With keynotes by David Black and Chris Wanstrath and talks about mocking, testing, and Ruby best practices, this should be a great way to improve everyone’s Ruby hacking skills.